Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Duniam for his question. He, like everybody on this side of the chamber, appreciates that there are no silver bullets to address the energy challenges that Australia faces. It requires consistent, comprehensive action across all of the different components of the energy market: retail, network, distribution and generation. All of those are essential for us to tackle, and that is why as a government we are taking action across each and every one of those fronts. It's why we are taking action in terms of generator reliability obligations, ensuring that they must balance intermittent renewable generation with storage backup to guarantee dispatchability; ensuring energy security obligations, so that the systems must deal with maintenance of inertia, to guarantee that systems continue to work effectively in the future; new arrangements around guaranteed closure notice periods that can provide governments with time to deal with the uncertainty created by intended closures such as that at Liddell, for example; and further pressure applying in terms of the abolition of the limited merits review process, so networks can no longer game the system, something that has hit consumers with about $6 billion in additional costs over a period of time. We're taking that action.

Those opposite criticised us, saying that it had been taking too long for the abolition of limited merits review to happen. The member for Port Adelaide attacked that in June this year, and yet the opposition in this chamber, when we bring legislation here, then delays its consideration, delays that action being put into place. It shows the hypocrisy we get from those opposite. Equally, we are taking the steps to get more gas into the market. This is important for direct gas users as well as energy consumers overall. Just last week, Santos announced it would provide an additional 30 petajoules into the domestic market as well as 27 petajoules for feedstock suppliers. This is critical. Labor again admitted they knew in government there was a problem there but did nothing. This government is fixing it.